Just saw this in a blog entry at alternet:
One of the lawyers handling the case for the defendants (that is, defending the constitutionality of Prop.
sent us a note recently[....]
Presumably, the blog software is set to automatically turn "8)" into a smiley icon. Cute idea, but perhaps a little overzealous.
I've seen this sort of thing happen elsewhere, in software that turns ":)" into a smiley icon. But a colon is much less likely than an 8 to appear just before a close-paren in ordinary English text.
I've had this problem on the support forums for the Spring Framework; mixing punctuation with text in non-standard-English ways is of course quite common in code samples. I think the one that's bitten me the most is turning "
Huh, I think the fact that my last comment included a "less than" symbol made part of it disappear. Let me try again and, you know, preview this time: I think the one that's bitten me the most is turning "<3" into a heart.
Just three days ago a co-worker IMed me to discuss a Perl module he was working on called "MRO::Define". The IM software replaced the ":D" with an idiotically grinning smiley face.
Here's a screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3649769/Screenshot-RJBS.png